Tag Archives: Cuyahoga County

If you haven’t voted yet, please go vote! There is still time, especially in central, mountain and western time zones. If you have voted already, here’s a nice article to reward you while we wait for the election results. And thank you for voting!

Early voting in Cuyahoga County ended as of 2pm on Monday and turnout numbers have already been sent to county parties throughout the state. Although Cuyahoga County will go the president’s way, just by pure party registrations, early and absentee voting numbers coming from the Cuyahoga County Republican Party should cause Democrats state wide and nationally to be concerned in terms of GOP enthusiasm in Democratic strongholds.

“What we have seen, as of this morning, early voting [in Cuyahoga County] shows an additional 17,000 Republicans over what we saw in 2008 and the number of Democrats voting provisionally is less than what it was in 2008, so the net is about a 30,000 vote swing,” said Doug Magill, Cuyahoga County Republican Party spokesman, on Monday evening.

Essentially, according to Mr. Magill, Republicans were outnumbered in Cuyahoga in early voting in 2008 4.1 to 1. In 2012 Republicans are only outnumbered 2.7 to 1 in early and absentee voting in the heavy Democratic County. “In Cuyahoga County that’s significant,” he said.

Here are some numbers Mr. Magill cited to think about:

In 2008 Obama received 72 percent of the absentee and early voting in Cuyahoga County for a total of 187,000 votes. McCain received 28 percent of the 2008 Cuyahoga County absentee and early voting. In 2012, absentee and early voting now is 128,000 Democrats versus 145,000 from 2008.

However, 47,000 Republicans turned out to vote early or absentee this year in Cuyahoga as opposed to the 2008 GOP turnout in the county, which was 34,000. “So that’s the swing–17,000 plus about 13,000. Actually, it’s about 30,000 and independents are down from 2008,” Magill said.

What the total means is that Democrats are at 55% of their absentee and early voting in Cuyahoga County than what they were in 2008.

Much of the world is going to be as surprised as the Democrats that Romney has won this election in a landslide, but this is what all of the preliminary numbers show. There is a huge advantage in voter enthusiasm for the Republicans this year. If you haven’t yet voted, go now and vote!

Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown was more than four months delinquent in paying taxes on his Washington, D.C., apartment and had to pay a penalty and interest last week.

This was not the first time, records show.

Brown also was delinquent in 2006 and 2007 and paid penalties and interest, according to tax records from the District of Columbia.

“I was late,” he said on a conference call with reporters when asked about the recent delinquency. “I misplaced the bill and I paid it as soon as I found out. I paid a penalty for being late, and it won’t happen again.”

When a reporter noted that it also happened five and six years ago, Brown said: “I misplaced it then. This is a small apartment. I’m not in D.C. nearly every week, I’m here when the Senate’s in session, I’m here three or four nights a week.

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama’s executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven’t paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama’s White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That’s up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration’s last year.

Nearly one-third of Obama’s aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each.

The IRS’ 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees’ tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.

The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That’s up 3% in the past year.

That scale of delinquency could annoy voters, hard-pressed by their own costs, fears and stubbornly high unemployment despite Joe Biden’s many promises.

The tax offenders include employees of the U.S. Senate who help write the laws imposed on everyone else. They owe $2.1 million. Workers in the House of Representatives owe $8.5 million, Department of Education employees owe $4.3 million and over at Homeland Security, 4,697 workers owe about $37 million. Active duty military members owe more than $100 million.

The Treasury Department, where Obama nominee Tim Geithner had to pay up $42,000 in his own back taxes before being confirmed as secretary, has 1,181 other employees with delinquent taxes totaling $9.3 million.

As usual, the Postal Service, with more than 600,000 workers, has the most offenders (25,640), who also owe the most — almost $270 million. Veterans Affairs has 11,659 workers owing the IRS $151 million while the Energy Department that was so quick to dish out more than $500 million to the Solyndra folks has 322 employees owing $5 million.

The country’s chief law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, has 2,069 employees who are nearly $17 million behind in taxes.

Two weeks ago, when billionaire Warren Buffett called for higher taxes on rich people like him, the liberal media predictably gushed and fawned.

Yet when Americans for Limited Government revealed last week that Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway has been in an almost decade-long dispute with the IRS over how much taxes it owes, these same press members couldn’t care less:

According to Berkshire Hathaway’s own annual report — see Note 15 on pp. 54-56 — the company has been in a years-long dispute over its federal tax bills.

According to the report, “We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments proposed by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (‘IRS’) for the 2002 through 2004 tax years at the IRS Appeals Division within the next 12 months. The IRS has completed its examination of our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2005 and 2006 tax years and the proposed adjustments are currently being reviewed by the IRS Appeals Division process. The IRS is currently auditing our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2007 through 2009 tax years.”

Americans for Limited Government researcher Richard McCarty, who was alerted to the controversy by a federal government lawyer, said, “The company has been short-changing the tax collection agency for much of the past decade. Mr. Buffett’s company has not fully settled its tax bills from 2002-2009. Yet he says he’d happily pay more. Except the IRS has apparently been asking him to pay more going on nine years.”

I wrote an entire post about hypocrisy on the left. It’s worth a read so that you know what to make about the “compassion” rhetoric of the left.

Robert Stacy McCain reports on the latest post-debate polls, but urges us to be cautious about believing them now, just because they are in our favor.

He writes: (links removed)

Nevertheless, for several months, I had been saying that I thought the outcome of the election would hinge on the debates, and the one-sided ass-whupping Romney put on Obama may have triggered a decisive shift that the polls are already beginning to detect.

If you check the Real Clear Politics national average, you see that Sept. 26/Oct. 1, Obama held a lead of four or more points after having been tied with Romney just a month earlier. According to Gallup’s tracking poll, Obama had led by 6 points most of the way from Sept. 19/Oct. 2. Both of these key indicators now show a trend toward Romney, who has closed the gap to 3 points in Gallup and 1.6 points in the RCP, which is mirrored in recent state-by-state results for Florida, Ohio, Colorado andWisconsin.

However, to emphasize again, polls are a lagging indicator. What is important in studying election polls is to follow the trendline, and we don’t yet have enough results from different firms to be able to say (on Oct. 7) that Romney’s looking like a definite winner for Nov. 6.

And McCain also links to this story about one of the bluest counties in the United States: (links removed)

You’d have to reckon that our president’s handlers thought that he would be safe visiting Cleveland, Ohio, a place that helped him win Ohio four years ago. Cuyahoga County yields the majority of Democratic votes from our state. But there’s trouble for Team Obama there today, in a dearth of Democrat registrations.

Here was how Mr. Obama was greeted at a local market:

An Ohio market vendor told President Barack Obama on Friday that his business has been going “terrible” since the president’s arrival, according to media reports.

Obama was greeting different vendors at Cleveland’s West Side Market when he came upon the proprietor of Rolston Poultry.

According to the White House pool report, Obama asked the man how business was going.

“Terrible since you got here,” he replied.

[…]That small business owner summed up the sentiments of many Ohioans, reflected in the new Rasmussen poll, also cited in the PJ Media piece on Obama’s Buckeye state woes.

So, there’s a problem with registering Dems in Cuyahoga County? That’s according to analysis by Clinton Cooper of Election Insights, who has been involved in local and regional government and politics for the last 10 years, including at The Ohio State University and in a policy advisory role for several government agencies and consulting firms in Ohio. Mr. Cooper claims that his data shows that the changes in voter registration in Cuyahoga County have made it extremely difficult for Obama to win Ohio.